One Less Hurdle for Usability Testing at UF
May
12
One of the concerns people usually have about usability testing is the idea that administering a test is something formal like a scientific experiment. To counter this, many testing experts suggest what they call guerilla testing.
Guerilla testing is a method of usability testing that uses materials you have available to you to conduct a quick, yet effective, test. This method shows that not only could usability testing be done without tight controls, but that a quick and dirty test is better than no test at all.
In working at an educational institution, I’ve seen questions crop up about the Institutional Review Board and whether those trying to test the usability of their sites are always required to submit to them a test proposal for review and approval. The process creates a hurdle for people attempting to conduct guerrilla user tests.
I decided to get to the bottom of the IRB issue by contacting Dr. Ira Fischler, chair of the IRB committee. Here’s what he had to say:
“No need for IRB review, because this is not “human research” in the regulatory sense (designed to contribute to generalized knowledge) but program evaluation / quality assurance (peer review isn’t part of the decision tree).”
In short, usability testing of web sites is not part of academic peer review, so IRB approval isn’t needed. This is great news for those who were eager to begin testing but were daunted by a lengthy committee approval process.
November 9th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I’m very interested in this because I’m currently administering a usability test to evaluate the usability of an open source website called Moodle. Could you send me more information on getting around IRB?
November 9th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
We weren’t trying to necessarily bypass the IRB. What we did was just ask the committee that evaluates IRB submissions whether or not we would have to go through the process and they told us that we didn’t.
If you are doing this work at a university, I would suggest speaking with the similar committee that makes these determinations.
Good luck!